Make incremental backups¶

Before you start¶

Install and set up Percona Backup for MongoDB
Check that pbm agent is running with the pbm status command
Check that all pbm-agents and PBM CLI have the same version. Otherwise we cannot guarantee successful backups and data consistency in them.

To check the version, run the following commands:
- pbm status to check the version of pbm-agents
- pbm version to check the version of PBM CLI.

Procedure¶

To start incremental backups, first make a full incremental backup. It will serve as the base for subsequent incremental backups:
```
$ pbm backup --type incremental --base
```
The pbm-agent starts tracking the incremental backup history to be able to calculate and save the difference in data blocks.
Run regular incremental backups:
```
$ pbm backup --type incremental
```

The incremental backup history looks like this:

Sample output

Snapshots:
    2022-11-25T14:13:43Z 139.82MB <incremental> [restore_to_time: 2022-11-25T14:13:45Z]
    2022-11-25T14:02:07Z 255.20MB <incremental> [restore_to_time: 2022-11-25T14:02:09Z]
    2022-11-25T14:00:22Z 228.30GB <incremental> [restore_to_time: 2022-11-25T14:00:24Z]
    2022-11-24T14:45:53Z 220.13GB <incremental, base> [restore_to_time: 2022-11-24T14:45:55Z]

Next steps¶

List backups Make a restore

Useful links¶

Last update: October 23, 2025
Created: October 23, 2025